Being a seasoned flyer I’ve been through many scary moments of flying. I’ve had my share of hard turbulence throwing me around in my seat, hard landings that made luggage bins pop open, and uneasy feeling landings. Never before have I seen such a giant aircraft being thrown around in the wind like I have this video.
There United Kingdom has its fair share of wind storms and has provided some great videos of airplanes landing in heavy cross winds. If you head over to YouTube and search for crosswind landing videos most of them will be from a couple of the airports around the United Kingdom.
With our modern technology for flying it’s not the enroute part of flying that’s the scariest, it’s taking off and landing. As the video shows when you have wind blowing across the aircraft it can really make it do some unexpected things. With how large the A380 is the big vertical surfaces of the aircraft catch the hard gusting wind and push the aircraft in a yawing motion. Standard regulations determine how strong the wind can be before an airport cannot accept anymore aircraft and I suspect that during this day it was right at the edge of that limit.
I’ve been on some scary landings during rough weather but I cannot begin to imagine what it must have felt like with the gigantic A380 being pushed around on the runway like a toy. The aircraft was practically drifting across the runway as it tried to slow down enough to get enough traction on the runway.
The reason the airplane started to drift all over the runway was that the wings were still generating lift and not enough friction was bearing down on the runway to stabilize the aircraft. Major kudos to the pilot for their command of the aircraft and keeping it as stable as they can on the runway and making it as safe as possible.
